Part of the problem is that the oil industry uses obscure units that don’t easily relate to the units for volume and consumption in common use in any measurement system. (That the USA is the only industrialized country not using the metric system is another issue). Who has any real idea of what a barrel of oil means? Also, using M to represent ‘thousands’ is all well and good, but is easily confused with ‘millions’. The rest of the world uses ‘k’ (10^3) to signify thousands and in that system, ‘M’ (10^6) does represent millions, ‘G’ (10^9) represents a thousand million ie an orderly progression of thousands (10^3). Most people using computers are familiar with this.
A petroleum industry barrel is 42 US gallons, equivalent to 159 liters, roughly a 4:1 ratio by volume, but neither has an easy such ‘rule of thumb’ conversion into other units such as cuft, cu metres, acre ft, or whatever, except within the metric system.
I don’t have values for crude oil, but 1 gall US of diesel represents 146,520 kilojoules, 138,874 Btu or 40.7 kilowatt hour of energy. Now how does this mean anything to anybody other than science and engineering types? In any case, is it really relevant to getting the point across?
Taking the OP example, if the conventional reserves are said to be 850 x 10^9 bbls (according to
Science Daily, excluding tar sands and shale oil in this 2010 study) the addition of 300 x 10^6 raises this to 850.3 x 10^9. It increases the reserves, but by only 0.035%!
I have always reckoned that the production data is only a part of the equation. It has to be read in conjunction with the known reserves and the past consumption. If the daily consumption is taken to be 90 x 10^6, then simplistically, the time to exhaustion is 25 years. I know, it’s much more complicated than that and too much can happen to make this any more than an academic number, but it is a useful metric to evaluate the rate of change between the marginal increases in reserves and the daily/annualised consumption. Contraction of this number would not be a good thing.
Tanada is on the right track in thinking about how to measure the impact of the contribution of a new or existing field or discovery, by phrasing it in terms that relate to people’s experience and relevance to their daily life, or in terms that can somehow value the find relative to the demand and known reserves. What also seems to be lacking is a general understanding that regardless of new finds, there is ultimately, a finite limit to the oil supply. To be useful, the DU term has to be accepted into general usage in the media.
The chances of seeing a full analysis of the oil situation in the mainstream media is remote imo. Bits and pieces are reported in separated articles or commentaries, but there is never any consolidated accounting of the state of the industry. It’s somewhat akin to financial accounting in that what we have here is the equivalent of a sinking fund, where withdrawals are made over a time period to deplete the capital to zero.
There is too much vested political and corporate interest in maintaining the BAU status quo. Watch the financial pages scratching around for signs of growth, no matter how weak. There can be no official benefit in forecasting the end of oil and taking steps now to mitigate the effects as long as possible. See what happened to Jimmy Carter who had the temerity to speak out albeit somewhat prematurely. No person of authority is going to blow a career by being direct, so BAU will go on until it can’t and the million man marches of the unemployed and dispossessed start.
Using Day Units is OK but I don't think it is catchy enough to catch on. You need something easily remembered and be widely understood by people texting in IMish. LOL, ROFLMAO etc. Perhaps DBD "Days before doom". 